Comparative theoretical analysis of distance estimation in visible light positioning systems

In this paper, theoretical limits and estimators are studied for synchronous and asynchronous visible light positioning (VLP) systems. Specifically, the Cramér-Rao lower bounds (CRLBs) and maximum likelihood estimators are investigated for distance estimation based on time-of-arrival (TOA) and/or received signal strength (RSS) parameters. Hybrid TOA/RSS-based distance estimation is proposed for VLP systems, and its CRLB is compared analytically against the CRLBs of TOA-based and RSS-based distance estimation. In addition, to investigate the effects of sampling, asymptotic performance results are obtained under sampling rate limitations as the noise variance converges to zero. A modified hybrid TOA/RSS-based distance estimator is proposed to provide performance improvements in the presence of sampling rate limitations. Numerical examples are presented to illustrate the theoretical results. © 2015 IEEE.